Tag Archives: policy

Countries in which girls are commonly married before the age of 18 have significantly higher rates of maternal and infant mortality, report researchers in the current online issue of the journal Violence Against Women.

The study, by Anita Raj, PhD, a professor in the Department of Medicine in the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine and Ulrike Boehmer, PhD, an associate professor in the Boston University School of Public Health, is the first published ecological analysis of child marriage and maternal mortality. …Read the full story from the UCSD Newsroom

Her research addresses gender-based violence, substance misuse and abuse, and sexual and reproductive health, with active projects currently in South Asia, Russia and the United States.

In May 2012, Raj and her colleagues published a report in the Journal of the American Medical Association on the results of two decades of efforts to eliminate the practice of girl-child marriage in South Asia. | Read the UCSD press release | Read the report

One in a Series of Occasional Stories About Faculty Members’ Children

Recently, to his mother’s wonderment, 17-year-old Thomas Ohno-Machado revealed that he is interested and quite active in politics.

It seemed to happen overnight, his mother said, and without any particular encouragement from his parents. “It doesn’t run in the family,” she mused.

Thomas, a senior at Torrey Pines High School, is the oldest of Dr. Lucila Ohno-Machado’s three sons. Lucila Ohno-Machado, MD, PhD, is associate dean for informatics for the UCSD School of Medicine and professor and chief of the Division of Biomedical Informatics in the Department of Medicine.

Thomas is now the founder and president of the Torrey Pines High School Autism Awareness Club and an advocate for children with disabilities. He and his friends have successfully organized a funding drive and raised money to benefit a local school for children with special needs.

One day out of the blue Thomas asked Dr. Ohno-Machado, “Mom, can we go to Washington, DC?”

It turned out he had written to Senator Barbara Boxer’s office and arranged to visit and express his concerns about federal support for biomedical and behavioral research, particularly for the National Institutes of Health, and for the increasing numbers of children who have special needs.

Dr. Ohno-Machado agreed to go. She arranged for him to add a one-day visit to Washington DC to a trip she had already scheduled. He purchased his first suit, from Macy’s, and carried it on the plane so that it would not wrinkle in flight.

She suggested he prepare for his audience with the senator, and he assured her, “Don’t worry.”

They arrived at Senator Boxer’s office and, with the Archbishop of California and a California judge who had come in with them, waited their turn to speak with one of the senator’s staff members.

The time came. Prepared with statistics to back him up, Thomas Ohno-Machado expressed his concern and asked to know what the senator was going to do about federal medical research funding and the rising numbers of special needs children in the United States.

The senator’s staffer responded by showing Thomas documents detailing how Senator Boxer and another senator are addressing these issues.

Said Dr. Ohno-Machado of the meeting, “I didn’t speak a single word.”

She and Thomas had tried but weren’t able to set up a visit to California Senator Diane Feinstein’s office on the same trip. In a separate solo trip, Thomas visited the governor of Massachusetts and a school for special needs children in the Boston area. Recently, he pressed his causes at the San Diego mayor’s office.

He is headed to UC Santa Cruz this fall. He plans on a political career.

Dr. Ohno-Machado is still marveling at how a strong interest can reveal itself so suddenly in one’s offspring.